


Brushfire Battles

by simplyprologue



Series: Dustland Fairytales [4]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Dustland Fairytales, F/M, Gen, Jossed, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 20:25:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3222269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The present tries to make sense of the past.</i> MacKenzie and Will in two different times and two different places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brushfire Battles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fredesrojo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fredesrojo/gifts).



> **A/N:** For those of you who have been following me that long, the original title of _Holding On and Letting Go_ was this, _Brushfire Battles_. But then you all probably remember another fic I wrote with an extended nature metaphor, except with water, so it got re-tooled. And so _this_ fic has a nature metaphor. Mostly to exasperate Meg, whose birthday this is written in honor of. She's been my best friend since October 2013 and is better than all of you, to be honest. She's just that good. She's put up with a tremendous amount of my shit, more than anyone ever has been willing to before, and for that alone I would love her. (There's also a ton of other reasons but she already knows those.) 
> 
> At this point, if you haven't read the other fics in the series, you're probably going to be lost because hey look, the gang's all here.

**KHOST, JULY 2008  
**

* * *

  
It’s one of her favorite things to do. Not that there’s much to be favored, or enjoyed. Just processed, completed, filed. She lives life now in facts and analysis and a stunning lack of emotional depth that only deepens through contraband liquor and the adrenaline rush of being shot at or near the blast site of a bomb. That, she feels—has to believe and cling to with all her might otherwise any remaining shred of herself that she knows might slip through her fingers—is safe. In this, her tendency to circle destruction becomes a public good. This is how she will become good.

Going along with the escorts of NATO supply trucks into the city is one of her favorite things to do, because despite the lack of color in her life, the mountains are objectively beautiful and somehow Zack is good at making her actually see their beauty through more than just the lens of the camera.

“This one’s a datura metel.”

In her hand is placed a cream flower with broad pointed petals rimmed with lines of violet, joining the fistful of other wildflowers Zack has already picked and identified and handed to her.

“It’s pretty,” Mac says, bringing it to her nose.

He smirks. “It’s extremely toxic to small animals and large animals, like humans.”

“Will tamp down on the urge to shove it in my mouth.”

Shrugging, he shifts his rifle where it’s slung between his shoulders. “I just know that you like purple.”

“And toxins, apparently,” she muses drolly, still holding the flower inches from her face.

“Sometimes women have needs. I can be sensitive to them,” he says, and the two of them are bunched together when the road narrows between two long rows of brush. Skimming his hand along the gnarled branches and soft wildflowers, Zack plucks out another datura, tucking it into a pocket in his fatigue pants. “We can send some home to that ex-boyfriend Molly has a hit out on for disparaging your honor.”

“I think I’ve already done enough to him without… what does this _do,_ anyway?” she asks, holding it a bit farther from her face, trying to adjust her helmet one-handedly.

(That’s Zack’s one rule.

He doesn’t give a shit where she accompanies him, or what questions she asks, or what political views she has on the War in Afghanistan, so long as she wears a helmet, regulation gear, and a kevlar vest. _You’re a pretty lady with a father with friends in high places. I know you’re fucking fearless, but let’s try to blend you in a bit with your surroundings so someone doesn’t try to take you hostage, since that’s only happening over my dead body and I’d prefer to stay alive._

Mac would debate the finer merits of whether or not the Taliban could connect her to Sir Edward McHale, former British Ambassador to a whole ton of places, including Soviet Russia, but Zack’s nineteen so she won’t get into it with him.)

“Flushed skin, headaches, hallucinations, and possibly convulsions or even a coma. Then death,” he rattles off, grinning impishly before picking another flower, this one a deep orange with tiny spiked petals on a clyme.  “Death in a very pretty package. This one’s a gomphrena.”

“Is this one toxic?” She takes the flower from him, holding it together with the datura and the others he’s already picked for her, as per their ritual. It’s heartbreakingly domestic, Zack picking her flowers on his patrols, reciting everything his mother taught him about them and the contrast is startling. A boy picking flowers for his mother in a warzone. And for her.

“They’re in the Amaranth family. My mom grows them in the greenhouse behind her shop,” he explains.

“Considering what I know about your mother, that’s not an answer,” Mac laughs, grinning widely.

Zack laughs too, scanning the cliffs above them. “Well she can sell these to customers, so—”

“Not toxic, okay.”

“I still think you should mail him some of the datura in one of those letters you think we don’t know about.”

“He grew up on a farm, I think he’s smart enough to not _eat_ a random flower an ex-girlfriend mailed him,” she mumbles, looking at the datura in her hand before folding it into the notebook she’s brought with her.

Zack shrugs, not looking at her. “I don’t know, maybe he’d eat it in a gesture of spite.”

“You do understand I don’t want him dead, just Molly,” she demurs, thinking about all the things she wants from Will, all them having to do with him answering her emails or letters or voicemails, even just to tell her to fuck off. Then at least she’d know that being here is the right decision.

“You want Molly dead?”

“You know what I mean, you punk,” Mac retorts, grumbling as they begin the steep incline and she tries to avoid being in the path of the NATO truck’s exhaust. Zack gestures her to walk in front of him, and she does, running her fingers through a nimble-looking shrub with small yellow flowers. “What’s this one?”

“Jawari. At least that’s the local name,” he answers. “In America it’s called Kochia. Native to Nebraska.”

Mac can hear the insufferable smile on his face.

If she didn’t like him so much…

“Molly is incredibly unsubtle, isn’t she?” she asks, trying to sound unaffected.

“You’d think that with a name as common as _Will_ she’d just, you know, call him by his name. Instead she verbally compiles his Wikipedia page which I guess is a stylistic choice,” he explains with a tone of nonchalance and what Mac thinks might be awkwardness. “I did try to not figure it out for a while but, uh—considering you used to work with him.”

Her eyebrows knit together. She’s _never_ brought up ACN to anyone in the unit who wasn’t Noah.

“I never said that I—”

Although Molly would be likely, or even Jim…

“Wikipedia.”

“Fuck.” And then the revelation only makes her more confused. “I have a Wikipedia page?”

“I think Molly made it,” he replies, sounding somewhat distracted, so she doesn’t say anything. But a minute later, when the road widens, he catches up to where she is to walk side by side with her again. “So… I fucked a news anchor and all I got was this military regulation t-shirt?”

“More like I fucked _over_ a news anchor,” she clarifies, forcing a smile.

“Molly thinks that he got you bounced from domestic journalism.”

“I fled willingly.”

“To scenic Pakistan, where you have been both shot at and tear-gassed, and CNN’s already talking about sending you guys to Baghdad like this shit is some kind of grand tour—”

Mac shrugs, sweeping her hands in front of her in an all-encompassing gesture. “Welcome to foreign coverage, sweetie.”

Zack cocks an eyebrow at her, looking incredibly young, and she has to remind herself that if things hadn’t gotten so dire at home he would have just finished his freshman year at Ohio State instead of patrolling through the mountains of Afghanistan carrying a M4. “What did you even do, Mum? Like, shit. Ain’t nothing worth living like this, unless you like—”

“Screwed around with an ex-boyfriend?” she says, still smiling, although she knows that it’s diminished. Zack flinches, but remains unconvinced as anyone who’s lived with Molly’s diatribes for months would be; Molly is incendiary, but effortlessly convincing. “Will’s a good guy. He’s a really good guy, and I was still kind of with my ex—who is a complete asshole, mind you, so I’m just mind-blowingly stupid—when we first got together. Until I realized how good a guy he is.”

His face screws up into an expression of distaste and vague confusion.

“Mac, you slept with two guys at once, so fucking what.”

She balks. “Zack, you’re nineteen, you don’t understand, and there’s stuff about Will that—”

“No but this is some high school level shit. Trust me ‘cause I’ve been there more recently than you,” he says, holding the semi-automatic closer to his chest, all bravado. But he doesn’t quite look at her, either. “So he dumps you. Fine, whatever, I’m not gonna argue that point, but shit, Mac. You could fucking die here. And you’re _here_ because you slept with two guys at once.”

It might be putting too fine a point on it, she thinks, but doesn’t say. It’s both true and untrue at once, and while Mac wonders daily if she’s becoming a cautionary tale (her life will definitely never be a fairy tale, that’s for certain, but she’s hoping for something more moderate in the end) she’s not in Afghanistan only for the sharp sting of exile and the accompanying nostalgia.

“I do like what I’m doing here,” she says quietly.

“None of us like what we’re doing here,” Zack scoffs.

Once more, the road narrows, and with his hand on the small of her back he guides her to walk in front of him.  
  


* * *

  **NEW YORK CITY, DECEMBER 2012**

* * *

   
Eight stitches in her palm, deep tissue damage, and a second degree burn arcing up her right arm. Will thinks she’s less fazed by that than she probably should be, or thought, up until a few hours ago. Now he isn’t entirely sure what to think, squinting down at the picture of Mac in camo fatigues and a helmet, huddled close with who he knows now is Danny, Zack, Johnno, and Molly. He wonders if it was Jim or Noah or Frankie behind the camera, just who it was that Mac was smiling at, a cigarette hanging from between her index and middle fingers on her right hand, a silver lighter in the other.

Zack looks disturbingly young. _Because he was,_ he thinks, reminding himself that Zack was younger than Jenna was when she was first hired, younger than when she got in line at Northwestern.

_His mother, a lovely woman named Tracy, is a florist. Before abandoning his family in 2007, Zack’s father managed the family farm while Tracy worked in town in her own store, a homey little spot on Main Street, just over 500 square feet with a greenhouse almost double the size in the back. When his father walked out, Tracy had the option to sell the farm or give up her lease; Zack, just eighteen, gave up his football scholarship at Ohio State and enlisted in the Marine Corps instead._

_Wherever the Expeditionary Brigade was ordered to go, Zack would pick and press flowers to send home to his mother, who is only a few years older than me. I came to know her in a backwards way, through the Latinate names of the blooms she adores and just how well Zack could put together a bouquet. He was roughshod, perhaps, grown in soil that was less-than-optimal, but someone had taken care to prune and prod him into a boy who was, despite his prickly exterior, gentle and kind._

_After most of his patrols, he’d come back in with a bunch of wildflowers tied by a strip of torn-off burlap, and hand them to me. On one patrol Molly and I accompanied him on, he taught us how to make flower crowns like his little sisters would make on the farm. I tucked a yellow poppy into the strap on his helmet._

_It’s odd to think about how happy I was, then. I wonder if what happened next hadn’t happened, I might have been able to move on._

_No one laughs at god in a war. No one laughs at god when they’re dying. Zack’s death came on a Tuesday, and his was the first. Not the first death in the unit, but the first death that I saw._

_It started as a routine patrol in a secluded section of the Khyber Pass. Two Humvees, and then a dozen marines on foot as we made our way through the mountains back down to Landi Kotal to where we were, for the moment, based. At the most dangerous part of the trek, with the mountain range to our backs and the waning sunlight obscuring what would be the best vantage points for any sniper, Noah ushered us into the caravan._

Will brushes his fingers through Mac’s hair where her head is resting on his thigh. She’s been asleep for almost an hour now, tossing and turning before finally colliding with where he’s sitting against the pillows and wrapping an arm around his thighs, pulling herself tightly against him.

Once more he reminds himself that she needs sleep.

Now he’s terrified about what she’s going to see _while_ she’s asleep. And he knows that she’s been coping with this for the better part of five years now, that _he’s_ the one who is new to this, and that’s _his_ problem.

His own problems have always been apparent. The depression, the therapy visits, the medications. The truth about his childhood came out later, but Mac’s always had a tendency to _get it._ Or so he remembers, but now he worries that the _getting it_ came after her return, and he’s just writing over who they used to be.

Not that it matters, he supposes.

_“I’m gonna go home now,” were Zack’s last words, mumbled and drugged._

_Zack passed quietly, two hours before the medevac arrived. At the end, Noah and I brought him to the back of the cave, where it was warmest, and wrapped him in everything we had. It was an internal bleed—when we palpated his abdomen it was thick and stiff with blood. He had taken a blow to the sternum, cracked his ribs and pierced his liver. He shivered relentlessly, but was beyond pain._

_His body laid on my legs until my thighs were all pins and needles._

_I don’t remember letting go of him._

He didn’t catch on for three years that Mac brought trauma back to New York with her, making her home in it when she could have been building a home with him instead, had he paid any attention at all. (Or read an email, listened to a voicemail, opened a damn letter.) Maybe that would have been enough to burn down the Nebraska farmhouse—the dark husk of a home built with wood that was rotted-out and crumbling at the touch—that he too had carried to New York.

He reads until a block of neat print in blue ink appears in the margins. It’s Molly’s handwriting, he’s learned; Mac’s copy of the manuscript is the one currently in his possession, and its pages are littered with comments and editor’s notes and Mac’s occasional rebuttals. This one, a page or two after Zack’s body was taken from her (his hand covering a large portion of Mac’s head as it’s pillowed on his thigh, he looks down at her and stares for a long moment, wondering images are currently flashing through her mind as he reminds himself of her warning: _I’m going to wake up screaming tonight_ ) makes his heart pound against his ribs.

_Tracy wants you to include that you paid for the funeral, in the event that you’re not for her or the girls’ sake._

All Will can think about is that he should have known.

Charlie told him.

He should have known.

They’re not who they used to be; those people are lost to them. And there’s a part of him that is further lost, a part that never had a chance before it was smothered when he was still a small child. And perhaps the part of herself that Mac lost, the part that left when she started holding boys while they died and when she started chain-smoking and drinking too much and when she started paying for funerals, that part was the part of her that could have moved on him from. Could have stopped loving him.

Guilt weighs him down.

It’s something else that further ties him to her, the parts that are left, and the holes that they have a chance to repair so long as they remain together.

On the nightstand, Mac’s BlackBerry vibrates as it’s been doing off-and-on all evening. Its Google alerts, as every gossip blogger paying attention brings their readership’s attention to his and Mac’s engagement. He’s already told Scott not to deny it, to issue a statement saying whatever he thinks will play the best—about his and Mac’s relationship and last night’s mishap with the sounding board—for Mac and to run it by Rebecca first.

Setting down the binder that holds MacKenzie’s manuscript, he reaches for her phone, typing in the lock code.

And then laughs, scrubbing a hand over his face.

_Google News Alert for: Will McAvoy. Nina Howard at…_

Well, he knew that she wouldn’t stay out of the fray for long. But he leaves the email unopened, setting the BlackBerry down again to return to the book.

He needs to know how to help her when she wakes up.  
  


* * *

**KHOST, JULY 2008**

* * *

  
The sun is hanging low in the sky by the time they return to FOB Chapman. It’s a dangerous time of day; their conversation drifts into a disquiet as they both keep their eyes focused on their surroundings from their perches in the back of the trucks. When the gate closes behind them, they relax.

But only for a moment.

Gunshots ring out, the loudness and rapport of which she recognizes as an AK-47; they’d been followed en route back from the city. The sound of boots on gravel joins the gunshots within seconds, and Mac jumps down from the back of the truck to move out of their way.

“Mac—”

Zack’s fingers close on her arms as he steadies her and spins her in the direction of her barracks.

Eyes going wide, she nods curtly. “Yup, see you later.”

Molly (true to form) is asleep in Mac’s bunk when Mac (out of breath from running against the current of Marines reporting to their positions) makes it through the door to the tiny barracks her team has been billeted to.

It’s a subdivision of a subdivision, corrugated metal walls met with plywood on top of a cement floor, lit by overhead fluorescent lights and furnished with regulation bunk beds and their own air mattress, a holdover from when they were sharing with a BBC team that came through.

There’s air conditioning, at least, a little boxy thing struggling to stay alive.

And at this point, four months into their stay, enough of their belongings are strewn haphazardly throughout the eight by ten foot space that it feels enough like theirs. Colorful wool blankets from Peshawar, clothes piled near the beds, glossy pictures of loved ones taped to the walls, posters tacked to the plywood, charts and notes and a large calendar in the middle of it all.

And Molly, sleeping in her rack.

“She has earbuds in,” Danny says, not looking up from his laptop. “I decided not to wake her for anything less than a bomb.”

Shoving a stack of clean clothes out of the way, Mac sits on the edge of her mattress, avoiding Molly’s legs. She has ideas on why Molly doesn’t like sleeping in her own bed, but none of them are worth bringing up at the moment.

Partially because it would accomplish nothing, and partially because MacKenzie has a suspicion Molly’s reasons are the exact same as Will’s used to be. So instead she looks up to where Jim is sitting cross-legged up on the bunk above hers, prodding the mattress through the slats in the bed frame.

“Get the camera ready?” he asks.

“Yeah.” Laying the flowers in her lap, she shrugs off her backpack. “Danny, email someone at _360_ that they’re gonna want five minutes with us in their B block, that we’re taking fire from the Taliban after escorting NATO trucks filled with food relief into Khost. I’ll see if I can get Noah to get permission to go on the air. Then file a wire report. I’m gonna call my source CENTCOM and see if anyone wants to talk to me about movement of more Taliban insurgents into this region.”

And so it goes.

For _hours._

Mac is called in front of the Brigadier General twice for a briefing, and regardless of whether or not there is enemy fire in the background they’re going on with Anderson Cooper at 5:12 AM. At a little past midnight, they started sleeping in ninety minute shifts, and by three Mac has Molly’s head on her hip and Jim’s on her shoulder and they’re all piled into her bunk, under her blankets, while Danny smirks up at her from the queen-sized air mattress on the floor as he fiddles with the camera and their satellite connection.

His laptop chimes.

“ACN has it.”

She shrugs the shoulder that Jim isn’t drooling on, looking up at the bottom of the mattress inches from the top of her head. “So what?”

“He knows,” Danny says, almost like a suggestion.

(Sometimes Mac wonders if they all think that despite it all, Will’s going to swoop in and take her away from here. Or maybe it’s just a coping mechanism for the days where it feels like they’re accomplishing nothing at all, tired and sore and bleeding and chasing down dead-end stories. On the days where it seems like they’re making nothing of themselves, just pulling themselves apart piece by piece.

Will’s her knight in shining armor, and hers alone. Molly’s made that much clear.

But maybe it doesn’t mean that they’re all not dreaming of escape.)

“I doubt he knows that I’m—that _we’re_ here,” she says with a sigh, wincing when she has to correct herself. “Mostly because he doesn’t care.”

Molly shifts against her, and tugs the thick wool blanket higher over her shoulders.

(The air-conditioning is put to good use during the heat of the day, but at night the temperature plummets. But the fan stays on, lest the air begin to taste of stale sweat and sawdust.)

“You’re the one whose name is on the report, Mac and we’re the only ones here to report it. NBC left Khost a week ago,” she mumbles.

Mace frowns. “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“There are things exploding not a half mile from here.”

“I’m putting you on the air in two and a half hours. Sleep.”

Red hair falling out of a loosened top-knot, Molly rolls until her head is in Mac’s lap, and she’s staring straight up at her with eyes that are red-rimmed with exhaustion. When the usual sharkish grin tugs at the corners of Molly’s lips, Mac has to restrain herself from just covering her smiling mouth with her hand.

“You should do it. So doucheface knows where you’ve been while he’s reporting on the winner of _American Idol_ and going for spray tans,” Molly says, and then pauses thoughtfully. “Also you look like you graduated college not in the last five years.”

Sighing, again, Mac tips her head back against the plywood divider between their barracks and the much larger one next to theirs.

As always, women are to be separated from men. At first she balked at this rule of Noah’s, until the first female medic that she found huddled in the shower. And it wasn’t like she didn’t know the statistics, she _does_. Still, she no longer lets Molly go anywhere alone and doesn’t complain when Noah makes her stay with one of _his_ boys or with her own team.

Molly’s written a piece on it, the rising rates of sexual assault in the military, but it’s shelved until after they’re off base. _That_ is not a dead end.

Mac’s not certain how long she’s been staring off in space when the building rattles and the power flickers and, seconds later, the noise of an explosion reaches her ears, startling her.

“That sounded close.”

“Maybe they’re taking the base,” Danny mutters, wrapping himself in another blanket. “I don’t wanna move.”

Mac pinches the bridge of her nose, resisting the urge to look at her watch and figure out how long she’s been awake; she was up and sitting in on the General’s first meetings before reveille. “I’m no damsel in distress. I can handle it. I got like three bullets on the target last week, we’ll be fine.”

He laughs. “If this base gets overrun and we get kidnapped, I'm telling them you're his fiance because no one else can afford our ransom.”

“Corporate sure as shit isn’t gonna pay out to save our asses,” Molly says, almost contemplatively.

Mac snorts self-deprecatingly, shaking her head and remembering what Zack said earlier. Electing to ignore them, she reaches for the radio hanging from the top bunk and turns up the volume to listen to the comm chatter before deciding against it; so long as everything is shrouded in sleep-deprived humor, she can pretend that there’s been no casualties. For a brief moment she feels guilty, as if she should be in the medic’s station if any of the boys get hurt to comfort them, but she reminds herself that she’s not their mother, that she’s already doing her job.

Besides, ignoring Danny and Molly has _never_ been a good strategy.

“No, no, it’ll work,” he reassures her, talking over whatever Molly just said. “Cause there’ll be a video from the Taliban and everything, and he’ll bend to public pressure.”

Mac looks down in time to see Molly lift an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t public pressure say to _not_ negotiate with terrorists?”

“Shut up.”

Rolling herself off the bed (while simultaneously rolling herself into a blanket) and crawling towards Danny’s air mattress, Molly makes a counter-argument. “I’m just saying that some of his viewers might find it more American for him to sacrifice his lady love in the tradition of women dying to provide men with character growth.”

Exhaling through pursed lips, Mac closes her eyes, trying to make herself oblivious to the newest episode of the Molly and Danny Show. Instead, she debates whether they want her to _hate_ Will or are just so exceedingly ridiculous in the hopes that she’ll become desensitized and, ultimately, indifferent to him.

“His entire image is based on being an overlarge golden retriever. Floofy-haired and harmless. Floofy-haired and harmless does not let a woman die when he has the bank account to save her.”

As if she doesn’t already scorn herself for trying to cling to the life she had with Will.

“Mac, just practice. Here, here look into the camera.”

If she doesn’t respond, they’ll have to give up.

“Okay, fine. Molly, you do a good Mac.”

Or not.

“Jesus fucking Christ, you two—” she moans, opening her eyes to see the camera on Danny’s shoulder and connected to his laptop, the recording light on. Of course.

Although, Mac thinks despite herself, if they die tonight, at least CNN will have hours of humorous footage to choose from due to Danny’s predilection to keep the camera running at all hours. Their memorial special will be quite something, if nothing else but for the sheer hilarity stemming from her team’s inability to filter after eight months of no sleep.

Molly cocks her head. “How is Jim sleeping through this?”

Danny shrugs. “Who knows?”

Looking herself at Jim’s sleep-slackened face, she wonders if there’s a way to get him off her without waking him.

“Oh Billy, I’ve been shown the error of my ways, and now the Lord is punishing me for my fall from some charmingly sexist Midwestern construction of womanhood and I need your jawline of an American hero and bank account of a famewhore old white guy—”

Mac’s head jerks back to look where Molly is now sitting bowlegged across from Danny, her face a foot from the camera while she blinks doeishly and affects what Mac thinks is a high-pitched but not wholly inaccurate imitation of her accent.

“Beautiful,” he says, overly serious.

Mac sighs. “He’s not old, Molly.”

Forty-seven is not _that_ old.

Molly is, unsurprisingly, undeterred. “Yes he is,” she says, snapping back to her usual accent for a second, then immediately switching back, “with access to primetime so I can come home and we’ll do a publicity tour for _Train Wreck with Will McAvoy,_ have a night of thoughtless passion on the road for old time’s sake, I’ll find out I’m _accidentally pregnant_ two weeks later—”

_For the love of—_

Molly nearly dissolves into giggles, pretending to swoon.

_“Molly.”_

They both ignore her.

“Mention his insufferable Republican-ness,” Danny mumbles, entirely absorbed.

“Are you directing this?” Mac asks, leaning as forward as much as she can, feeling Jim wobble against her side.

“Yes”

Molly laces her fingers together, bringing her clasped fists to under her chin. “—and after our quickie wedding to salvage your outdated and chauvinistic sense of honor we’ll live happily ever after and if you try to divorce me I’ll take half of everything since I have your child and you’re insufferable about values voters and won’t ask for a pre-nup.”

Honestly, Mac thinks in a moment of brutal honesty without self-condemnation, at this particular moment in time she thinks she’d take that scenario.

She has no idea why she can’t get over Will.

(Yes, she does, and it has everything to do with the fact that she knows _how much better_ she was when he was her anchor and _how much better_ he was when she was his EP and that can’t just be for nothing, the two of them making that much sense just can’t be for nothing.

The longer she stays in the Middle East the less things make sense. So she keeps writing to him, hoping that he’ll write back, hoping that everything will make sense.

But until then she’ll keep chasing after the story, telling herself that she’ll be good, she’ll make herself make sense some other way, through a well-informed public and officials held accountable and through marked things like awards and battle scars worn like scouting badges.)

Danny adjusts the camera on his shoulder.

“Tearjerker. Yes. Absolutely captivating. Now just—”

They all jump when a bullet hits the air conditioner, and the motor whines uselessly before a piece breaks off. Mac turns up the radio.

_Enemy combatants appear to have lit a substantial amount of the dead grass to the east side of the base on fire to provide smoke cover. Stand by for further orders. Mason, do you copy?_

“Fuck.”

Metal screeches against metal, and Molly curses, hopping up to turn the air conditioner off. Her foot catches on her blanket, and she nearly falls.  
  


* * *

**NEW YORK CITY, JANUARY 2013**

* * *

  
The first round of depositions fall during the last week of January. Will antagonizes Jerry’s counsel through his own, wondering if he can draw their ire enough to take some of the focus of the complaint off of Mac.

It doesn’t work.

Not that the lawyers found anything truly damning in discovery. Not that there wasn’t a wide berth of topics that Rebecca objected to as irrelevant, either, before the judge ahead of time. “The stabbing,” Mac concedes afterwards, fingers tight on the handles of her purse. “They know about the supply run but didn’t know what to ask. It was mostly the stabbing. They’ll ask Jim, too, tomorrow—”

“But he wasn’t there for it. No one was.”

“Anything but the damned thing they could ask about just makes her look like a damn hero,” Rebecca says, striding past them where they’d huddled together in the lobby of Jerry’s lawyer’s downtown offices. “You did fine, Mac. At no point did I feel like strangling you, which is more than I can say about your idiot fiance.”

“Well, he tries,” Mac says, smirking tiredly.

That’s Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday night they go home after the broadcast, and she’s pulling him into bed the minute they cross the threshold into the apartment. If an orgasm would help her then he has no objections, and she comes twice with her thighs wrapped around his head before finally pulling him on top of her. Wednesday morning Mac goes to therapy, and is tense and quiet the rest of the day even after Jim reappears in the afternoon from his own round with Dantana’s lawyers. Wednesday night she drinks too much, and he spends most of midnight holding back her hair while she vomits. Thursday morning she spends hungover in bed, muttering how she’d rather deal with this than another night terror, and he says nothing and brings her tea and eggs and toast. Mac doesn’t want to talk Thursday, either, but won’t let go of him either. She can’t sleep that night, and very early Friday morning confesses that she thought that Jerry’s lawyers would find what they were looking for, and that would have been easier. Will thinks he understands. He understands that Mac needs control, anyway, and handles crises better than the unknown.

“It happened.” Eyes shining in the darkness, she lies in bed next to him, staring up at the ceiling. “It was a thing that happened. They were all things that happened. If it wasn't for Jerry fucking Dantana I think I’d finally be moving past all this _shit_ that’s happened. It’s been four years.”

“What did Laura say?” he asks, not touching her. It took him thirty years to leave his father’s house after closing the door behind him for the last time at nineteen, but he won’t tell her that these things are allowed to take time.

She sighs. “That at least I’m not operating like I’m in a warzone anymore.”

And with that, she rolls onto her side and on top of him, pulling off her tank top.

Friday afternoon Jim comes into his office holding a manila envelope in front of him that Will figures based on his expression has both everything and nothing to do with what happened in _his_ deposition on Wednesday.

“What?”

The envelope is tossed on his address, and he sees the Ohio postmark stamped in red on the corner.

“Tracy Holland mailed this to me awhile back,” Jim says after a pointed stretch of silence. “When she got Zack’s effects she didn’t go through them, but since she read Mac’s thing she—well, she finally did. Turns out I really was the only willfully ignorant one. Anyway, she passed this along.”

He shrugs, and Will watches him the whole time it takes for him to leave his office, closing the door behind him.

Exhaling heavily, he sits, tearing open the flap on the envelope. Out falls a sealed business envelope with what he recognizes as a previous fanmail address, and another sheet of paper with letterhead for The Flower Cupboard in a town he doesn’t recognize.

_Mr. McAvoy,_

_I know you’ve read MacKenzie’s project, and that you know about my son, Zachary, who was KIA in Afghanistan in 2008 while stationed at FOB Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan with the 7th Marines, 1st Regiment Expeditionary Brigade. Mac, and her account of my son’s last months, has finally allowed me to begin to move on._

_As I’m sure you’re aware, Mac and Zachary were quite close. There are things I will never be able to repay her for, like holding my baby boy while he died. I have no idea what his letter to you contained, although Molly’s considerable temper probably had some bearing on it. This is one of the last things I can do for my son, and I do hope you keep in mind that he was just a nineteen year old kid when he wrote it._

_Best,_

_Tracy H_

He hasn’t actually met any of them yet. Danny was briefly at a Christmas party they dropped by during a PR circuit the Lansings ordered them to attend, but it was nothing more than a handshake and a few niceties. Regardless, Jim told him not to worry about Danny, unless he’s with Molly.

And then with a smile that reminded him of the fact the Jim barely tolerated his existence his first eighteen months working at _News Night_ , informed him that the marines had nicknamed Molly the Red Scare while they were in Kandahar.

But Will’s just looking for answers.

He opens the second letter.

_July 12, 2008_

_Mr. McAvoy,_

_You’ve never spent a day in uniform. Not that I blame you, I never would have chosen this life for myself, either. I was set to play ball for Ohio State. I read on your wiki page that you played for Nebraska. I mean, fuck Nebraska, but still I can respect it. I was going to be a kicker, played all four years on varsity in high school, the whole deal. Then my old man walked out. No warning, no nothing. Just got in the truck one morning, drove onto the main road, and kept driving. He abandoned us._

_My mom, she’s a great lady. Never got the chance to go college, was excited for me to go. She tried to hide how bad things were getting from me and my little sisters, but I wasn’t a dumbass. We were about to lose the farm and she was going to have to sell her florist’s shop. So I drove in to Dayton, to the recruitment office, and enlisted in the marines. We needed the money to pay off the tax lien the old man left us with, and if I joined the service, we’d get benefits._

_I had a good reason, I think. My old man abandoned his wife and children after almost twenty years. I’ll never know why._

_Mac is embedded with my battalion, which is captained by Noah Mason. I’ve known her, and her team, for almost eight months now. We go all over the place, barely staying more than a few months as light-armored ground combat support and security logistics. I’m still fairly new at this, but I can recognize the look someone has when they have nothing left to lose._

_I see a lot of my mother in MacKenzie McHale, too. You see, my parents were having some troubles. Money shit, personal shit, all of it. But none of it warranted abandonment._

_I don’t give a flying fuck with Mac did. I don’t care if embedding was something she wanted to do anyway. But this shit, what we do in this uniform and what people like Mac do, you need people back home. She’s got no one, and I don’t think she knows where she’s going. I think she thinks if she stays here long enough, you’ll read a fucking email._

_If you love someone, you don’t abandon them. You fight with them, you break up with them, you get in the car and drive for hours and scare the shit out of them when you come home past midnight, but you don’t actually leave. So here’s the deal: if you don’t love her, tell her. You might save her life. And if you do love her, take it from a marine and man the fuck up and deal with whatever damage you have to start fighting with her again. Mac’s a good person and I am willing to deal with anyone who says otherwise. But she needs someone. Not a team of people who work for her, not a supervisor, not a source. She needs a partner. She needs you to tell her she can stop, before she gets hurt._

_As a last note: fuck you, stop acting like this is some high school shit. She’s in fucking Afghanistan. If someone in Afghanistan writes you a letter, you fucking read it, douchebag._

_PFC Zachary Holland_

He stares at the letter, his eyes wandering over the sloppy penmanship fitted between tight lines on the yellowed paper. Stares at the letter, remembering the picture of the cocky boy with a lopsided smirk and an arrogant way of holding a cigarette.

Wondering why the letter was never sent (although god only knows if he would have read it, back then) he looks back to the date at the top of the letter.

 _July 12, 2008._ Ten days before he died.

For some reason, all Will can think of is all the flowers dotting the mountains of Afghanistan, and all the letters he left unopened, even after taking them out of the trash.  
  


* * *

**KHOST, JULY 2008**

* * *

  
“Someone should really tell him that that kind of pinstripe makes him look like he’s on ESPN, not the face of a cable news network,” Danny muses, putting his feet up on the coffee table.

“What?” Jim asks, monumentally confused.

Molly tilts her head, and talks around the power bar in her mouth. “He looks… broad. And like he got dressed in the dark.”

“Okay.”

The lights in the rec room are dim, and Mac rolls her eyes as she passes behind where they, along with Frankie and Johnno, are piled into together on the worn plaid couch that sits only a few feet from the small television set.

The skirmish is over, but the fire is still burning outside the base’s fortified walls. Until the helos carrying water from Helmand arrive all unnecessary personal and reporters are to remain in barracks and are forbidden from the showers lest they need that water, too. The effect of which is that Mac has given up all the baby wipes and dry shampoo she’s been hoarding in her duffle bag, but it makes for more comfortable quarters until the dried out fields of brush surrounding the base is no longer on fire.

Even if controlled, brushfires burn long and low.

“Would you change it to CNN already?” Jim asks, reaching to take the remote from Molly’s lap.

Zack, his hair fringed with ash, is seated at one of the folding tables against the wall.

“Hey,” she says, dropping into the chair next to him.

Tongue wedged between his lips, he doesn’t look up from his hands as he carefully presses the wildflowers from earlier between carefully rationed sheets of wax paper.

“Writing your mum?”

He nods, gently transferring the flattened bloom into the pages of an encyclopedia from the base's meager library. She watches him work with the datura, the gomphrena and the jawari and the other kinds of amaranthus he picked on the patrol.

A torrent of laughter comes from the direction of the couch, and Mac lifts her head to look back at them.

“Does it bother you?” Zack asks.

Mac blinks, confused. “Does what bother me?”

“When they make fun of him like that. I mean, it’s not good-natured.”

Standing, he leans his palms onto the cover of the encyclopedia, bearing down on it with all of his weight. Biting her lip, Mac tries to think of how she wants to respond.

“They do it because they think he’s not good enough for me. I think they’re trying to convince me that he’s not good enough for me,” she answers carefully, looking sideways up at Zack, who lifts an eyebrow at her. She shrugs. “I gave up trying to defend him to them. He’s already committed the cardinal sin of putting a kitten cam on his show.”

(If Will wasn’t in a downward spiral into complete pedestrianism she wouldn’t love him any more than she does now, but she thinks she might be less miserable. But she doesn’t know how to convince any of them, even Noah, that _News Night’s_ complete lack of journalistic credibility hurts her more than it’ll hurt any of them.

She knows why Will needs everyone to like him. And she’s only made it worse.)

“I mean, it must seem pretty insulting to them,” he says, sitting down again. “They’re out here and he’s got his poncy New York apartment and cushy desk job.”

The life from behind the anchor desk is less than cushy in few ways, but she won’t go into them.

“Poncy?” she asks, smiling at how the word exits unimpeded from Zack’s mouth as easily as the word _fuck_ does.

He colors faintly.

“It’s a word my mom uses.”

Giggling, she turns away from him, trying to hear what the CNN broadcaster is saying. She wonders if they should all be more worried about the brushfire, but reminds herself that the immediate danger has passed, even if all the flowers except the ones in Zack’s hands and the ones in her bunk are gone.

 _Weeks, in small sections,_ the Colonel told her. _But no one’s in danger from it, ma’am._

On the television, Wolf Blitzer segues into showing the viewers their footage of the fire.

“Do you have a girlfriend back home?”

Zack snorts. “You know I don’t.”

“Did you?” she asks, resting her head in her hands.

“Yeah,” he answers, looking down at the flowers he’s packing into a manila envelope.

“What happened?”

“When my dad left, shit got real for me,” he says with a shrug, purposefully nonchalant. “She was still a kid, I felt like I had to grow up and probably took some shit out on her that she didn’t deserve, she couldn’t possibly understand what I was going through—it stopped working. When I started thinking about enlisting we broke up.”

She looks at him. A boy in a man’s life, sending his mother flowers the only way that he can. Someday, she thinks, Zack might get something he actually deserves.

He reminds her of Will, in too many ways. She doubts entirely that he would see it as a compliment, even if their character is starting to diverge the longer she knows Zack.

“What’s her name?” she asks, still looking at him.

“Jenny.”

“Where is she now?”

Exhaling through his nose, he pulls out a pack of cigarettes from his side pants pocket before patting himself down for his lighter. With nimbler fingers, Mac reaches into a pocket of her own for the silver lighter she’s been carrying since Charlie forced it into her hands last August.

“College,” he answers shortly, cupping his hand around the flame before tacitly offering her a cigarette.

Figuring she’ll need the nicotine to stay awake to do another segment on the _Situation Room_ in an hour, she takes one.  
  


* * *

**NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 2013**

* * *

  
It continues. It doesn't get better, it doesn't get worse. It just continues. And Mac, with her incredible strength, continues. They report on meteors over Russia, Christopher Dorner’s spree murder, the resignation of one Pope and the selection of another, a nuclear weapons test in North Korea, the insurgency in Iraq, and Mac focuses a little too much, in his opinion, on the fighting in Northwest Pakistan.

When he can’t sleep (his and Mac’s insomnia rarely seems to coincide these days) he rereads her book, willing the pages to spur some revelation on how to help her. Instead, all he realizes is who probably does.

Which is how he winds up doing the math to figure out if it’s a decent hour in Ramstein, picking up Mac’s BlackBerry, and calling Molly Thompson for advice. How he winds up videochatting with her is less clear, but then he remembers that Molly relies largely on cold reading people and mutters curses under his breath before accepting the invitation and very much ignoring the fact that for some reason, he’s nervous.

In theory, she shouldn’t be threatening. When the video loads, she’s in a button down flannel shirt, her hair hanging over one shoulder, wire glasses glinting in the sunlight.

And then she smiles.

“You’re a preening peacock with a stupid Republican haircut. But Mac loves you, so yeah, I’ll dig my feet in a bit.”

He nods, adjusting his laptop where it sits on the dinner table. “How long have you been waiting to say that to my face?”

“Years,” she says with a snort, lacing her fingers together over her knees before leaning forward where she’s sitting on a couch in a bare living room. “Okay, so while I would love to sit and shovel talk you… one: there’s already plans for that when we all get home next month, and two: I need to go do a thing in a few minutes, so let’s make this quick. What is she doing and how much does it kill you to admit that I might know Mac a tiny bit better than you?”

“Why do you think I think you know Mac better than I do?” he asks evenly.

Molly laughs, although her eyes glint hard. “Why did it take you almost four months to ask for my help?”

The morning after the engagement replays in his mind, Mac and Jim looking at each other at the mere mention of Molly like the whole friendship is one endless inside joke. And no, he’s never been good at _people_ when he’s not cross-examining them or if they’re not MacKenzie and so _yes_ it’s mildly alarming at how many people Mac collected after he shut her out.

(Seven, at last count, and almost half of them marines.)

He tries to remain unaffected. After all, he has to respect Molly’s knee-jerk instinct to protect Mac. “You’ve been referred to as terrifying by multiple sources.”

Snorting, she covers her mouth with her hands. “Good to hear that Jim is keeping my street cred up.”

Still, a giggly redhead should not be this disarming. But there’s something to her, more so than with Jim or with Danny, and maybe it is her youth, or the fact that she was the first among them. He’s off balance with her, desperate to make Molly approve of him because she spent three years holding the very sane opinion that he could be no good for Mac.

Molly bites her lip.

“What is she doing?” she asks, her face smoothing into a more serious expression. “Is she drinking?”

“No,” he answers, wincing at how defensive he sounds.

She blinks, unimpressed.

“So yes.”

“I… a bit more than usual,” he replies, tamping down on the urge to lie and say no, Mac is just fine and fuck you for thinking otherwise. “A lot more than usual, but it’s not the drinking, it’s not like how she wrote about it in her book. It’s the insomnia and the fact that she forgets to eat and I feel like—”

"I cannot begin to articulate the absolute impossibility it would be for me to care less than I already do about your feelings. So let's just agree that this will go easier if we agree not to lie to each other." The giggly girl is gone, replaced by a woman with pinched eyes and pushed-back shoulders. “Your father was a violent alcoholic.”

No, he knows the difference between what Mac is doing and what his father became, that’s not his worry.

“Yes, but I’m not saying that Mac’s going to become—”

Not that she lets him finish, and suddenly all of Mac’s assertions that Molly needs to be on television make sense. Not that they didn’t before, not after watching her on _This Week_ protecting Mac’s reputation. But talking with her now makes him feel like he’s in the anchor chair.

“Right now, you feel out of control,” she says slowly. “Especially since you’re getting advice from a thirty year old who you find intimidating because she carried your fiance out of a riot that you feel that you sent her into.”

“Tell me how to help her.”

Molly waves a hand in front of her face. “You see, I’m an insufferable asshole because I spent most of my childhood bouncing from foster home to foster home. I know exactly what your damage is.”

“I feel like this is a shovel talk,” he says, rather than directly address what she just implied.

Curling her lip, she almost laughs, wrinkling her nose. “I really can’t help myself.”

“I can respect that.”

Brows furrowing, she doesn’t quite look at him right-on. Licking her bottom lip, she asks, “Have you ever heard the term brushfire battle?”

“I grew up in—”

“Nebraska, yes the entire planet knows,” she says in a way that is distinctly long-suffering. Clasping her hands again, she explains slowly, “It’s a diplomatic term for a low-intensity conflict. It’s a form of counter-insurgency and it’s a long, long game. And you’re fighting it on every front with every weapon that won’t allow the enemy a proportional response and you pray to god that the flames won’t grow out of control, that you let it burn long enough that instead of destroying everything you have something left to replant in your new, more fertile soil.”

He could interrupt to explain that yes, he grew up on the plains, so yes, he knows the point of controlled wildfires. But she’s a policy expert with a PhD from Princeton so he’ll let her feel like she knows more than him.

"This is a metaphor."

"Yeah, and you should understand it since your father used to beat the shit out of you,” she snaps, glaring at him before deliberately softening her posture and her gaze. “I don’t like your emotional impulsivity but something must have happened in that brain of yours that you realized that you’d rather try to have something with Mac rather than continue to be a petulant manchild. It only took you _years_ to figure it out.”

“I _do not_ understand what you are trying to tell me,” he replies, gesturing forwards with both hands. “I know it’s going to take time. I want to know what I can do to help her _now_ so that she’s not spending more _years_ in pain and you’re the person who knows—”

“I know that you help,” she says, slowly flicking the words out from between her teeth like she doesn’t want to even taste them in her mouth. “Do you understand how pissed I was, the night of the supply run? Mac was—she was fucking gone, for _hours,_ just lying there until _News Night_ came on, and your voice alone made her stop disassociating. And I knew that—we knew it would work, too. God, I don’t think I ever hated you more than I did that morning.”

For a brief moment, Will wonders how strong Molly’s mask is. Or mirror, as Mac called it, wondering if Molly is just following his cues. He doubts it; she doesn’t want to put him at ease. At he doesn’t blame her.

“I do love her,” he tells her, realizing his voice is verging on imploring. “And I’m sorry, and I’ll never hurt her again.”

She snorts, and rolls her eyes. “You can’t promise that.”

“I’m going to keep it.”

The smile returns.

“Good, ‘cause I’ll kick your ass if you don’t.” She stares at him, eyes sharp and discerning. “Do you really want advice?”

Nodding, he drops his shoulders. “It would be appreciated.”

Her answering nod is curt, and short. Swallowing hard, she looks like she’s gathering her words. And then all at once:

“Stop thinking you’re going to find answers falling out of the sky or in her book, because I mean I Iove Mac, but that story is very much edited and condensed and if you don’t fucking _talk to her_ —like goddamn did six years of bullshit teach you nothing? She never would have gotten so fucked up if you talked to her. Neither of you would have gotten so fucked up.”

Staring hard one last time, she reaches for her webcam, turning it off. And for some reason, all Will can feel is relief beyond the pangs of guilt and nerves and what he thinks might also be grief. Absently, he closes the lid of his laptop, his legs refusing to work until he pushes himself up out of the chair at the table.

_Just talk to her._

Jim, and now Molly. Two for two. It feels impossibly simple and yet unfathomably complex, but possibly that’s what all simple solutions to monumental problems feel like. There is no quick fix for what is happening right now. And he _knows_ that. The ring wouldn’t fix all of their problems, neither could saying _I love you_ or _Will you marry me?_ and it would be stupid to think so.

It feels like it should be more.

Like he can’t possibly be enough for MacKenzie, but he realizes that’s the last six years pushing itself to the front of his conscious once more. That he can’t possibly be good for MacKenzie, not after all he’s put her through, after all the fires he’s lit.

He, too, needs to start growing.

So he wanders his living room, spending unmeasured minutes staring out the windows and at the ceiling and walls before coming across the box containing Mac’s copy of the current version of the manuscript, several texts she’s been using for sources, and a heavy encyclopedia on tribal culture.

His finger traces the cracked leather spine before he picks up the unwieldy volume, the pages parting in his hands.

And out falls a wax paper envelope.

With clumsy hands he opens it, pulling out a well-creased piece of lined paper and a dried orange flower. Holding the stem between pinched fingers, he opens the letter.

_July 22, 2008_

_Dear Will,_

_Zack died today. Molly is in the sickbay. I’m trying to make sense of what happened. I don’t think there is any. This flower’s a gomphrena, that’s what Zack said. I don’t know how to make sense of anything. But I think I’m going to stay here. I’m going to keep trying to reach you, but I’m going to stay here, all the way to the end. For as long as I can. I think this is what I’m supposed to do, now. I won’t stop. I have no rosebuds to gather. But I have Zack’s gomphrena._

_You must have seen the fire on the news, and the skirmish. Captain Mason thinks it’s the same group. We were ambushed. I don’t know how much more I can say. But this morning they put the last of the brushfire out as we brought Zack’s body back. In some of the scorched parts you could already see shoots peaking up through the soil._

_I’m sorry. And I love you. I’ll never stop._

_Love always,_

_MacKenzie_

She must have never mailed it, is his first thought. And then, without thinking at all, he sets down the letter and walks into the bedroom instead of answering the cigarette craving that’s beginning to manifest under his skin. Flower still in his hand he sits down next to Mac’s still form, and winces when she jerks awake.

“Hey, sorry. It’s just me. I couldn’t sleep.”

He switches on the light.

There are parts of her that he thinks will always be closed to him, dead-ends that she will do her best to scorch entirely. Parts that she’ll never be able to talk about. She’s _killed_ people. He has no way of relating to that, he can't expect her to talk about  _that._

But Zack, he thinks. And flowers.

Mac’s spent six years talking to him. It’s his turn to answer.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
